London--What can ordinarily be objectionable about Ivo van Hove's too often juvenile look-at-me directing is that he thinks it's innovative to play up a script's subtext. That, of course, is just what writers don't want done. It's called "subtext," for the blaring reason it's meant to remain sub.

Since Tony Kushner could be considered to know best, why not quote what he says he admired after seeing Ivo van Hove's revival of the playwright's Pulitzer Prize-winning Angels in America, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music: "It had this feeling of being stripped to its absolute bare bones."

At the time of it's original release in l974 Ingmar Bergman's Scenes From a Marriage was the perfect antidote to the wave of post-modernism which hovered like a horrible tsunami, threatening to place the iteration of most emotional states in quotes.

Sometimes things aren't quite what they seem. Walking through Washington Market Tavern's unassuming doors prepares you for a gastropub experience but what lies ahead is more akin to straight up fine dining minus the white table clothes.